The true story of a womanising con artist enlisted by the FBI is now an
acclaimed film starring Christian Bale. Meet Mel Weinberg, the man who
inspired American Hustle

The yacht motored gently through the warm waters off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, while the men on board sipped cocktails and took turns having their photograph taken with their amiable host, an Arab sheikh by the name of Karim Abdul Rahman. One of those men, Angelo Errichetti, was the mayor of Camden, New Jersey. By the time the boat had come in to dock, he had agreed to use his political connections to help the sheikh stay in America indefinitely.

What Errichetti didn’t realise was that the “sheikh” worked for the FBI, and everything he’d just said had been recorded on hidden cameras. In fact, this was just a small part of what would become the agency’s biggest and most controversial investigation into government corruption – an elaborate sting in which a fictitious Arab sheikh would offer money in return for favours.

The sting was known as Abscam – short for Arab Scam – and it would see six members of the American House of Representatives convicted on corruption charges, plus the first sitting senator sentenced for a federal crime in more than 70 years.

When the investigation became public in early 1980, the already shell-shocked were even more surprised when they discovered the identity of the operation’s mastermind: a cigar-smoking conman called Melvin Weinberg who should have been facing jail time himself. But, instead of making him stand trial, the FBI had decided he was so good at scamming, they had recruited him, paid him a generous salary and retained his services for years. Now Weinberg is the main character in a new film based on Abscam, American Hustle, directed by David O Russell and starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. And it all began with socks.

Weinberg was born to a Jewish father and Swiss mother in the Bronx. By the time he was in his early thirties he’d moved out to the west coast with his first wife, Mary, and their three children and was in on a scam selling jackets. Only, they weren’t really jackets; they were just the front portion. The same man sold Weinberg footless socks (just the ankles) and Weinberg offloaded them on busy commuters, varying the location he’d stand hawking his wares each day. “I knew I’d have to sell ’em in the morning while people were on their way to work,” he says. “If I sold them in the evening they’d have time to look at them.”

Eventually, Weinberg missed the east coast and moved back to New York where he began selling glass. According to the late author Robert Greene, whose book The Sting Man tells his story, Weinberg swindled customers using “appeals to their ethnic pride” – selling inferior glass to Italian-Americans by attaching stickers that read “Made in Italy”.

He soon graduated to advance-fee scams. In return for a fee paid in advance, Weinberg would offer loans to people with bad credit through a company he set up called London Investors. The only problem was the bank from which the loan was supposed to come didn’t exist. “The guys I conned were conmen themselves,” Weinberg tells me. “Legit guys weren’t going to come to my office for money. They’d have gone to the banks.”

Christian Bale (playing a character inspired by Weinberg), Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper in American Hustle

He always made it clear there was no guarantee his “bank” would agree to the loan but, unfortunately, the advanced fee was non-refundable. A period of obfuscation then followed, after which Weinberg would break the bad news: the loan had been turned down.

Another scam involved what, in banking, is known as a certificate of deposit or CD. If you have half a million dollars in a legitimate bank, that bank can issue you with a CD which you can then use to secure a loan from another financial institution. Weinberg would tell his clients that although the overseas bank he dealt with had rejected their loan application, it had agreed to send a CD showing a large sum had been deposited with them which his client could then use as security for a loan elsewhere. Naturally, for this there would be a fee.

Weinberg knew that the key to success was looking the part: his office was always in a nice building; he bought the best furniture, the most expensive desks. “I had a big Lincoln limousine which I bugged,” he says. “So by the time clients arrived at the office I knew all about them.” Weinberg was so convincing that on one trip to Texas, a lawyer to whom he was extending a fraudulent loan arranged for him to use the plane belonging to the state governor. He was subsequently made an honorary citizen of Texas.

In addition to a penchant for money, though, Weinberg had a weakness for women. As Greene wrote in his book: “There were the girls and the money. Lots of them and lots of it.” So while Mary was stuck in the suburbs with their three children, Weinberg had begun renting an apartment for his secretary, Marie, who he had been seeing on the side. Eventually, Mary divorced him and he married Marie, but, five years after that, he started seeing someone else: an Englishwoman called Evelyn Knight. He maintained one home with Marie and another with Evelyn, both with identical decor. “I’m a creature of habit,” Weinberg explained.

Today, Weinberg lives in a retirement community an hour east of Orlando, Florida. Now in his eighties, he finds it difficult to get around – punishment, he says, for years of excess. He greets me at the door wearing a white sweatshirt and braces, jeans, and a pair of orange-tinted glasses.

He leads me into his office and sits down at a large white desk. On the shelf behind him is a New York Police Department hat (ironically, his son is a cop), two copies of The Sting Man, the page-turning romp about his escapades, published in the Eighties, on which David O Russell based his film, and books including Donnie Brasco, War of the Godfathers and Inside Hoover’s FBI.

Mel Weinberg leaving court in Brooklyn, New York, in 1980 (AP)

Weinberg paid $138,000 cash for this house in 1993. He tells me he’s never had a mortgage. He doesn’t socialise much; “people are nosy and want to know your business”, he says. But once in a while the “wise guys who live in the area” will pay him a visit.

His life of crime could have come to an abrupt end in 1977 when he was arrested in Pennsylvania. An estate agent called Lee Schlag had paid Weinberg an advanced fee of $3,500 for a $2m loan and when Weinberg had started to do his usual routine to avoid paying out the money, Schlag had smelled a rat and called the FBI.

He was charged with wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy and an arrest warrant was drawn up for his girlfriend, Evelyn, as well, who had been used by Weinberg (unwittingly) to add a touch of class to his operation. (As he told Greene, “she was the salad dresssing, the schmaltz”, he used to seduce prospective clients.) In the film Amy Adams plays Sydney Prosser, a character inspired by Evelyn.

To his shame, after initially hiding his mistress in a safe house, Weinberg handed her over to the feds. “I told them: ‘let’s make a deal’,” he says. “You feel like a real f---ing heel.”

But before the case went to court, Weinberg made another deal with the FBI: he’d work for them. “The FBI wanted four cases from me,” he says. In return, his three-year prison sentence would be reduced to three years’ probation. And so Abscam was born. Weinberg would pose as the representative of a fictitious Arab sheikh who wanted to invest in American businesses, buy stolen art, and bribe politicians in return for help with immigration issues.

In one particularly elaborate sting, the FBI told Weinberg about an art thief who had stolen millions of dollars worth of paintings. Weinberg arranged to meet the man (“a large Italian crook”) in upstate New York, but when he saw the paintings he professed that he didn’t know anything about art and that he’d have to get an expert to view them. The man was concerned it might be a set up, Weinberg says, so he told him they could go up in his private plane and that the man could nominate any airport within the state – that’s where they would exchange the money for the paintings.

“So that’s what we did,” Weinberg says. “We went up in my plane: him, me, a pilot and my art expert. Except the art expert and the pilot were FBI agents. And instead of $1m, the FBI gave me $300 in a briefcase and told me not to show it to him, that I was to just give him a quick glance.

“It was freezing in the plane and the guy must have weighed 350lbs so the plane is bouncing all over. He asked to see the money but I said ‘sit down you fat b------’. Finally we land and we’re clearing the snow off the banks we’re so low. The signal [for when the FBI would make an arrest] was when Bishop [one of the agents] put his pipe in his mouth.”

But, before the FBI steamed in, Weinberg needed an excuse to get away from the thief. The man had a gun and he was worried he might get injured in a gunfight. So, in typical uncouth fashion, he told the man he smelled. Weinberg removed himself from the group and, as he did so, he saw an agent running towards them. “They handcuffed me as well,” he says. “When they handcuff the good guy they make it tighter; they love it.”

Weinberg pulls open a drawer in his desk and removes a leather-bound black book. The word “Mel” is embossed in gold lettering on the front. “Ninety per cent of the people in that book are crooks, conmen and hit men,” he tells me. “These are the people I dealt with. You can look because most of them are dead or in jail.” I flick through the book: every entry is neatly written; just a name and, in most cases, several phone numbers attached to each.

“Dealing with the FBI, they make you think they’re friends with you,” Weinberg says, “but I had to have proof that what I was telling them was true so I recorded everything.” The practice of recording conversations was central to the Abscam operation. Weinberg says there were over 1,000 video and audio tapes in the end. “They played every one in court. I fell asleep a couple of times on the stand.”

Mel Weinberg photographed at home in Florida, November 2013 (BETTY HANSEN)

There was a fairly substantial difference between working for the FBI and working for himself. Where Weinberg had been used to expensive hotels, designer suits and all the trappings to ensure the clients he was scamming believed he was bona fide, his work for the FBI was on the government’s dime. “We used a broken-down building near the FBI office to bring people in,” he says. “John Good [the agent in charge] got $25k for the operation, leased a Lincoln Continental, but he didn’t have enough money left for a decent office and equipment. It’s got to have schmaltz. It’s got to look like it’s got money,” Weinberg says. It didn’t. But it would have to do.

The Abscam operations finally came to an end in February 1980. The stings took place largely in Florida, New York and New Jersey – in hotel rooms where the FBI could hide cameras and wait in an adjoining room ready to pounce.

For one of these stings, aimed at catching someone selling stolen art, the FBI and Weinberg set up camp in a suite at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In the absence of food, somebody decided to call in a kosher delivery. “They ordered from Shmucks Bernstein,” Weinberg says. “It was a farce. Here was an Arab eating kosher food in a headdress made for a kid. The thing came down to his shoulders where it should have come down to his knees. It was stupidity.” Then the tape recorder, strapped underneath the coffee table, fell on the floor. “Luckily, the guy we were targeting turned around and I managed to kick it under the table.”

Despite a seemingly hapless plot, things were about to ratchet up a notch. The FBI had heard that Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (and the man who inspired the character played by Jeremy Renner in the film) was boasting of his connections with politicians and organised crime. Weinberg says the Bureau was putting pressure on the lead agent in Abscam to reel him in.

Christian Bale in American Hustle

Ahead of Errichetti’s meeting with the Arab aboard the yacht off the coast of Florida, Weinberg told the FBI the sheik would need some sort of gift to present to Errichetti – as was traditional in such meetings. Given the FBI’s meagre budget for the sting, Weinberg found an old knife he’d bought at a flea market in Greece. “I got on the phone to Angie [Errichetti] and I told him the knife meant friendship for life; that it was the Arab way. He got the knife all right.” According to a newspaper report at the time, as the hidden cameras were rolling, Errichetti accepted a $25,000 down payment on a $400,000 fee to pull strings on projects involving a New Jersey casino.

“Errichetti was offering us everything,” Weinberg says. “The resort wouldn’t get the license unless he OK’d it.” Errichetti ended up serving 32 months at a federal open prison in Connecticut, but before he was brought down, he’d introduce Weinberg to six congressmen and a senator (New Jersey Democrat Harrison Williams), each of whom would lose their liberty at the hands of Abscam.

In an attempt to discredit the FBI’s case, Williams’s attorney told jurors Weinberg had been a criminal since he was eight. “He has been perpetually in trouble,” he said, “and has boasted, has bragged, that he is the greatest conman.”

Throughout the Abscam operation, Weinberg claims the FBI threatened that if he didn’t do what they wanted they’d see to it that he went to prison too. “But they depended on me to make all these cases,” he tells me. “They think wise guys are stupid. I’ve lived this long; I must be a little smart.” Weinberg says the FBI paid him $3,000 a month, which he describes as a “s---” salary, even for the late Seventies and early Eighties.

During the Abscam trial, Weinberg’s sexual indiscretions would come back to haunt him. Marie, his wife, was demanding a divorce, and she appeared on television intimating that her husband had accepted a payoff from an Abscam defendant. But a year after the trial, Marie was found dead on the staircase of a Florida apartment.

She had apparently hanged herself. A suicide note read: “My sin was wanting to love and be loved, nothing more”, and she spoke of a “campaign” by Weinberg to discredit her. Marie’s attorney refused, however, to believe that she’d taken her own life. The FBI maintain it kept a close eye on Weinberg and that he never accepted a bribe from anyone connected with the investigation.

As Abscam came to an end – federal prosecutors secured 19 convictions altogether – an FBI agent left the Bureau and recruited Weinberg to work at his private investigations agency. Soon afterwards, the conman took a $65,000-a-year job as an investigator for a law firm in Chicago which was employed by various design houses, including Louis Vuitton and Gucci, to close down warehouses manufacturing counterfeit clothes and bags. When The Chicago Tribune tracked Weinberg down in 1985, it dubbed his new job “Bagscam”.

In March, 1982, he married Evelyn Knight but the pair have since divorced. Today, Weinberg lives alone. Knight is only a short drive from his home, he tells me, “but she won’t talk to me any more”.

Weinberg says the production company behind American Hustle paid him $250,000 for the rights to his story. It also flew him to Los Angeles and put him up in a hotel for three days, during which time he met Christian Bale.

“He’s a very down to earth guy,” Weinberg says. Bale kept asking him to repeat what he was saying so he could mimic how Weinberg spoke. “He said: ‘You never get excited, do you?’ and I told him it’s important never to show a person you’re getting upset.”

They didn’t use Weinberg’s real name in the film. “It’s Irving, some bull----,” he says, laughing (it’s Irving Rosenfeld). “And I’m wearing a green jacket in one scene. I wouldn’t be seen dead in a green jacket. Wise guys dress in dark clothes. It’s just how you dress.”

American Hustle is released in the West End on December 20, and nationwide on January 1